Big Bang Ricochet - WW2 Collection: Osaka Sokosha

First is rarely best. While the Sumida Wolseley Sokosha was the first armored vehicle produced by Japan, it was quickly recognized there was a need for significant improvement in the vehicle's mobility. Between 1930 and 1932, many projects were undertaken in the effort to make those improvements, until the first tracked vehicles began rolling out of the factories. As the Type 92 tankettes and Type 89 medium tanks began to roll out, it was decided by the Daihon'ei (Imperial General Headquarters, the Japanese equivalent of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) that tracked vehicles were the only way to provide the necessary mobility for military activities in Mainland Asia. The Imperial Japanese Army abandoned all armored cars incapable of rail use, and did not mass produce another military armored car for 80 years until the introduction of the Komatsu Light Armored Vehicle in 2002. The fleet of abandoned armored cars were then provided to the Army of Manchukuo.

The Osaka Sokosha was one of those attempts to improve upon the Type 88 Sokosha. In this instance, improvement was to be brought about by using more modern components, like a more powerful engine and wide pneumatic tires. This particular vehicle was not particularly successful and ended up being donated to the Imperial Japanese Navy by a local patriotic group in mainland Japan, allowing it to see combat in the Second Shanghai Incident in 1932.

Unlike past issues of Big BangBig Bang Ricochet, the silver-covered books will provide everything necessary to allow you to drop the vehicle straight into your game. No more hunting for other issues covering weapon entries included in previous issues. please be aware this all-inclusive nature means that these silver edition booklets may occasionally duplicate material that has appeared in previous products.

These products were created by scanning an original printed edition. Most older books are in scanned image format because original digital layout files never existed or were no longer available from the publisher.

For PDF download editions, each page has been run through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to attempt to decipher the printed text. The result of this OCR process is placed invisibly behind the picture of each scanned page, to allow for text searching. However, any text in a given book set on a graphical background or in handwritten fonts would most likely not be picked up by the OCR software, and is therefore not searchable. Also, a few larger books may be resampled to fit into the system, and may not have this searchable text background.

For printed books, we have performed high-resolution scans of an original hardcopy of the book. We essentially digitally re-master the book. Unfortunately, the resulting quality of these books is not as high. It's the problem of making a copy of a copy. The text is fine for reading, but illustration work starts to run dark, pixellating and/or losing shades of grey. Moiré patterns may develop in photos. We mark clearly which print titles come from scanned image books so that you can make an informed purchase decision about the quality of what you will receive.

Original electronic format

These ebooks were created from the original electronic layout files, and therefore are fully text searchable. Also, their file size tends to be smaller than scanned image books. Most newer books are in the original electronic format. Both download and print editions of such books should be high quality.